Krannert Art Museum exhibitions are made possible in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Kennedy Browne: The Special Relationship is co-sponsored by Culture Ireland and the European Union Center at the University of Illinois. The production of The Redaction Trilogy and other works in the exhibition has been supported by The Arts Council / An Comhairle Ealaíon. The exhibition’s public programs are supported by the Frances P. Rohlen Visiting Artists Fund/College of Fine and Applied Arts, School of Art + Design Visitors Committee, and Krannert Art Museum.

A collaboration of Irish artists Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne, Kennedy Browne’s videos, workshops, and sculptural installations have probed common stories of global capital: the effects on workers of relocating companies, the visionary boyhood narratives of tech company founders, and struggles over privacy in the age of the internet.

The exhibition will survey six bodies of work in video, sculpture, and text produced by Kennedy Browne since 2009. The presentation is named for one video titled The Special Relationship (2013), which juxtaposes a voice diagnosing posttraumatic stress disorder with photographs of airplanes carrying US military personnel landing and departing from Shannon, a regional airport in the west of Ireland. Officially a neutral country in all wars, Ireland nevertheless has a special relationship with the US that the works in the exhibition uncover. From Ireland’s position “between Boston and Berlin,” a geopolitical frame once described by Irish politicians, Kennedy Browne gives US museum audiences new perspectives about both countries’ roles in international commerce and technoculture.

The Special Relationship is Kennedy Browne’s first US museum survey.

Curated by Amy L. Powell, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with research assistance from Alyssa Bralower, doctoral student in Art History